Happy ending

For other uses, see Happy ending (disambiguation).

A happy ending is an ending of the plot of a work of fiction in which most everything turns out for the best for the hero or heroine, their sidekicks, and just about everyone but the villains.

In storylines where the protagonists are in physical danger, a happy ending would mainly consist in their surviving and successfully concluding their quest or mission; where there is no physical danger, a happy ending is often defined as lovers consummating their love despite various factors which may have thwarted it; and a considerable number of storylines combine both factors.

A Times review of "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" strongly criticised John le Carré for failing to provide a happy ending, and gave unequivocal reasons why in the reviewer's opinion (shared by many others) such an ending is needed: "The hero must triumph over his enemies, as surely as Jack must kill the giant in the nursery tale. If the giant kills Jack, we have missed the whole point of the story."

A happy ending is epitomized in the standard fairy tale ending phrase, "happily ever after" or "and they lived happily ever after." (The Arabian Nights have the more restrained formula they lived happily until there came to them the One who Destroys all Happiness (i.e. Death). Satisfactory happy endings are happy for the reader as well, in that the characters he or she sympathizes with are rewarded.

The presence of a happy ending is one of the key points that distinguishes melodrama from tragedy. In certain periods, the endings of traditional tragedies such as Macbeth or Oedipus Rex, in which most of the major characters end up dead, disfigured, or discountenanced, have been actively disliked. In the eighteenth century, the Irish author Nahum Tate sought to improve Shakespeare's King Lear by rewriting the ending so that Lear survives, Cordelia and Edgar marry, and the three sisters are reconciled. Most subsequent critics have not found Tate's amendments an improvement. Happy endings have also been fastened to Romeo and Juliet and Othello. Not everybody agrees on what a happy ending is.

An interpretation of The Merchant of Venice’s forced conversion of Shylock to Christianity is that it was intended as a happy ending - since Shakespeare's audience took for granted that being a Christiian is a happier and more satisfactory situation than not being one.

Similarly, based on the assumptions about women's role in society prevalent at the time of wrting, "The Taming of the Shrew" concluding with the complete breaking of Kate's rebeliousness and her transformation into an obedient wife counted as a happy ending.

A happy ending only requires that the main characters be all right. Millions of innocent background characters can die, but, as long as the characters that the reader/viewer/audience cares about survive, it is still a happy ending. Roger Ebert commented on this in his review of Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow; "Billions of people may have died, but at least the major characters have survived. Los Angeles is leveled by multiple tornadoes, New York is buried under ice and snow, the United Kingdom is flash-frozen, and lots of the Northern Hemisphere is wiped out for good measure. Thank god that Jack, Sam, Laura, Jason and Dr. Lucy Hall survive, along with Dr. Hall's little cancer patient."

The same can be be said of "Schindler's List" with its backgound of the real-life Holocaust. The murder of six million Jews is a given which the viwer knows about in advance and which goes on throughout most of the film. Still, as long as the specific Jews on whom Schindler has cast his protection (and who are the only ones given a name and face in this film) survive against all odds, the audience still goes out feeling that they had experienced an uplifing happy ending.

Since the ending is the point at which a narrative ends, a "happy ending" is constructed in a way so as to imply that, after the conclusion of the narrative, the lives of all the "good" characters will be filled with happiness and that any unpleasantness they encounter will be negligible. However, as is often demonstrated through the creation of sequels, it is conceivable that the characters' happiness will be ruined after the "curtain falls." This means that a storyteller can create a happy ending to a sad story (or vice-versa) merely by ending the story before a horrible tragedy occurs or, if the tragedy is not irreversible, by continuing the story on after its original end so that the characters can overcome it. Either way, the "ending" is changed without altering the story's canon.

In the modern world, happy endings have sometimes been viewed as an American specialty, and the English-language words happy ending (or happy end) have been imported as-is into other languages to make this point. In the 1928 Austrian operetta, Die Herzogin von Chicago, the two lovers who are too proud to speak to one another are finally brought together by a Hollywood producer who explains that he plans to make a movie of their love story, but that he cannot, until it has the required happy ending.

The tendency of Hollywood to prefer a happy ending is especially manifest in various film adaptations of literary works where the original does not have such an ending. For example, Hans Christian Andersen's classic "The Little Mermaid" ends with a tragic noble sacrifice where the Mermaid must see her beloved Prince marry another girl - but in the Disney version, the Mermaid does get to marry her Prince and live with him happily ever after, and a Disney sequel - obviously impossible for the Andersen original - centered on the daughter born of this marriage.

Some works of fiction, such as Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's operetta The Threepenny Opera or F. W. Murnau's film The Last Laugh, have intentionally implausible happy endings. The P.D.Q. Bach opera The Stoned Guest originally ends with all of the cast strewn about dead on the stage (similar to the ending of Hamlet). However, as the residents of the town would be disappointed with such a gloomy conclusion, Bach is urged to rewrite the opera. Thus, he has all of the cast suddenly spring back to life with no explanation whatsoever and sing a piece entitled "Happy Ending!" (P.D.Q. Bach albums are satires created by musicologist Peter Schickele.)

The decision of Marvel Comics to kill off Gwen Stacy, the girlfriend of Spiderman, aroused considerable shock and protests by readers, and "The Night Gwen Stacy Died" is still hotly debated by comics fans, decades after the issue featuring this event was published - testifying to how much a happy ending is expected as a matter of course and how shattering its absence is taken.

Further reading

• Thesis on Happy Ends (film studies) (German)

Happy Ends in der zeitgenössischen amerikanischen Komödie